


Fresh Out of White Flags

by Kacka



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 06:53:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6274201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kacka/pseuds/Kacka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy doesn't mean to be territorial about his favorite study spot, he's just set in his ways. It wouldn't be a problem if a certain blonde would stop trying to steal his table.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fresh Out of White Flags

If Octavia were here she’d tell him he was being too proprietary, too dedicated to his routine, too prone to see the worst in people. And she’d probably be right.

But Octavia isn’t here, and so he ends up getting into– or starting, depending how you look at it– a territorial dispute over a table in the library.

Bellamy’s freshman year, he’d spent a lot of time there in the course of his roommate’s quest to hook up with every available and interested guy in their dorm. Bellamy didn’t hold it against him, exactly– his roommate wasn’t out in high school, and therefore got very little action– but he did find himself another roommate sophomore year. Even then, trying to maintain eligibility for his scholarship drove him to spend more nights studying than he would prefer, and he found himself returning to the quiet, bright building where he could stay up without worrying about waking Miller.

By the time he starts working on his senior thesis, he’s got a system: he’ll settle in at the table on the fifth floor in the back corner, where there’s a plug and a window (making it feel slightly less like a prison) and decent proximity to the history stacks. He doesn’t consider himself an exceptionally superstitious person, but if his system isn’t broken, why fix it?

During exams, he pretty much camps out to ensure he gets his spot. He’s figured out by now when to expect competition for it and stakes his claim early. Most of the year, it’s his for the taking.

Which is why it’s such a surprise to show up on a random Tuesday at the beginning of the semester to find his table occupied. On one side sits a blonde with curly hair pulled off her face and secured with what looks like a paintbrush. She’s got earbuds in and various textbooks spread across the surface, sitting cross-legged in what he thinks of as his chair. She looks settled, and it irks him. Diagonally across from her is a guy with some badass tattoos on his incredibly muscular arms, running one hand over his shaved head and staring down at his notes in evident distress.

Bellamy sighs and makes his way down a floor, feeling unsettled and unable to focus on his research. This chair squeaks, the window faces the side of the adjacent building instead of over the top of it, the light down the hall flickers intermittently. He can’t get into a rhythm and spends most of the next couple of hours trying to find excuses to go upstairs and check whether the other students are gone.

Octavia snapchats him as he’s taking one last desperate lap to the fifth floor and has just about resigned himself to unproductivity. She’s his only friend on snapchat, but he gets to see her face every day so in his mind it’s worth having the app on his phone.

She’s sent him a video of a guy riding across her campus on a unicycle, overlaid with several question marks, and he snaps her back a blurry, distant photo of the two table-snatchers, captioning it with as many angry emoji as will fit on the screen.

She texts him immediately. _Which one are you mad at, the girl or the guy?_

 _Both_ , he texts back. Then, realizing she has no context, adds, _That is MY study table. I can’t get anything done rn._ Octavia’s little typing bubble is up for a long time before she finally sends, _smh_ , and he figures she got distracted laughing at him. It’s fair. He is being a little bit ridiculous. He turns to make his way back down to gather his stuff when his phone buzzes again. She’s elaborated on her head-shaking with, _priorities, bell. they’re cute. go make friends & maybe they’ll let you sit w them. then you can have your precious table back & also pretend you have a social life._

But Bellamy doesn’t listen, because as much as Octavia is the one to turn her enemies into friends with the sheer sparkle of her personality, he’s always been the one who cares a little too much about holding grudges.

In his own defense, it wouldn’t have become A Thing if the blonde hadn’t kept coming back.

She’s there most Tuesdays and Thursdays after five, which he only notices because that’s when his last class ends. He takes to packing up discreetly about two minutes before the professor finishes and bolting out of his seat before the aisles can get clogged with slow walkers and chatty students. Once, he sees her walking just ahead of him across campus and he speeds his pace until he’s passed her and rounded the corner. He’s not proud of it, but his strategies pay off: his table is always blissfully vacant.

Each time, the girl walks by his table, checking to see if it’s available, and when it isn’t she moves to the next window-adjacent option. He can’t help but notice her intense focus, can’t help his interest when he glimpses intricate doodles on her notes, can’t help wondering if she knows she’s competing with him.

A few weeks into this routine, she gets one over on him. He shows up at the same time as he always does, and she’s already there, acting like she owns the place. When he stops short she looks up, giving him a lips-pursed smile that could pass for friendly, though he chooses to interpret it as smug. He has to work to keep a scowl off his face and sits with his back to her, fuming for an hour before he gives up and goes home.

He considers skipping his lecture on Thursday, but decides that might be a bit extreme. When he shows up, she’s not there yet, and he tosses his jacket across the chair next to him, unpacking more books than he strictly needs so that he can mark his territory.

She shows up a few minutes later and sits a few tables down, facing him. He keeps his eyes studiously on his notes and counts it a victory.

The following week, the tattooed guy is back at Bellamy’s table. He stews in annoyance, which only doubles when the blonde shows up and takes the seat her friend has clearly been saving for her. She makes eye contact and he doesn’t try to hide his glare this time, which strangely makes her smile brighter.

A couple of days later, he’s actually beginning to make some headway on his thesis when she slides into the chair across from him and declares, “I think we should call a ceasefire.”

“You’re just saying that because I’m winning,” he says before he can filter that thought. She's still, by all accounts, a stranger. He could at least pretend he has some dignity.

“I'm not admitting defeat just yet. But you have the only plug on this wall and my cord doesn’t reach that far.”

“Oh.” This is a compromise he hadn’t expected. It seems obvious, in retrospect, that not everyone would be as averse to calling a truce as he is, but it had sincerely never occurred to him. “Then sure.” He clears his belongings off the far end of the table and she lets her books fall against the wooden surface with a resounding thunk.

“Thanks,” she says, smiling at him, and– she’s really pretty. It’s mesmerizing. She twists her blonde hair up on top of her head and sticks a pen through it, catching him as he watches. “What?”

“Nothing.” She quirks one eyebrow at him. “It’s just. I’m trying to figure out how that works,” he says, indicating her hair. “It doesn’t seem to be following the same laws of physics the rest of the universe lives by. That’s all.”

She smiles again and he wonders how he never noticed his library nemesis was beautiful.

“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” she says, still smiling, like she’s in on a joke he didn’t hear. Maybe he actually did miss something when he was staring at her.

“Surprised about what?”

“That you’re a huge dork,” she says, but nicely. Fondly. “I mean, you’ve spent the semester trying to engage me in passive-aggressive library table warfare. I should have known you’re not a jerk, just a nerd.”

“I can’t be both?” He says, returning her smile and hoping he hasn’t turned too red. “I was trying to be subtle, believe it or not.”

“Pro tip: sprinting past me on the quad to get here first? Not that subtle.”

“I wasn’t sprinting,” he grumbles. “But I see your point.” She opens her laptop and seems ready to tune him out, but he’s not quite ready to let her. Not yet. “What exactly are the terms of this ceasefire?” He asks. She cocks her head to one side, considering.

“We share the table when we’re both here. No more taking up four times as much space as you need just to prove a point. In return, I won't make my friend Lincoln snag it for me anymore.”

“I guess that’s reasonable,” he says, holding his hand out to shake hers. Her grasp is firm and her eyes are warm and maybe Octavia was right. He should have just made friends in the first place. “I’m Bellamy, by the way.”

“Bellamy,” she repeats, and his name has never sounded so good before. “Nice to officially meet you. I’m Clarke.”

It’s not long before Clarke becomes one of the most constant presences in his life. He’s not close with many of his classmates or coworkers. Octavia is present, but from afar, and he and Miller keep different enough schedules that he sees his roommate only infrequently. Clarke, on the other hand, he sees a couple of times a week. She’s the one he complains to about his crappy days, the one who laughs at him when he gets caught in a downpour on the way from class, the one who helps him verbally process his thesis, the one who shares her popcorn with him, the one who waits until one in the morning for him to be ready to leave so he can walk her back to her dorm.

He gleans bits and pieces of information about her life outside the library from their scattered conversations: that she works at the campus coffeeshop, that she prefers dark chocolate to milk, that she wants to go into art therapy. That she’s got a sharp sense of humor and a short fuse when she’s tired. That she almost decked him one day when she came into the library after a stressful conversation with her ex and found him sitting at her favorite table.

That she’s stubborn when she’s made her mind up. Especially when she’s made her mind up that a little thing like the flu isn’t going to stop her from acing her midterms.

“You look awful.”

“Whoa there, sweet talker.” she croaks.

“You sound even worse,” he frowns, reaching a hand out instinctively to feel her forehead. She doesn’t pull away, but even with the clammy skin and the red nose and the glassy eyes, she looks bemused. “What’s wrong with you?”

“You want an itemized list, or–”

“I meant, what are your symptoms?” He asks, retracting his hand. “Besides congestion and sore throat, obviously.”

“My real mom, who's a real doctor, already did this bit. Do I have to run through it with my school mom, too?”

“Sorry for caring,” he snorts. “Seriously, though. You should be resting with soup and Netflix right now, not sitting around in this dust trap.”

“That would be letting them win, Bellamy.”

“Letting who win?”

“I don’t know. Whoever sneezed on me the week before midterms,” she groans, face-planting in her open book. Her head probably feels like it’s filled with the heaviest cotton balls in the world, and he doesn’t know what to do to make it better except pat her curls awkwardly. “I’m going to track them down and make them suffer.”

“If they had what you have, they’ve suffered enough,” he points out. “And in their defense, they probably didn’t mean to contaminate you.”

“Biological warfare is serious business, accidental or not.”

“For someone who claims to be an innocent bystander, you sure get sucked into a lot of wars.” He scratches her scalp lightly like his mom used to do for him when he was little and she releases a contented sigh that turns into a cough halfway through. “Really, Clarke. You should go home.”

“Can’t yet,” she says picking her head up. “Gotta get through this problem set first.”

He can only listen to her sniffle for so long before it gets to him. He pushes back from the table and she looks up at him in surprise.

“Is this your unconditional surrender? Am I the winner?”

“Don’t get excited. I’m just going to get coffee. Watch my stuff?”

“I’m probably going to auction it off to the highest bidder.”

“Yeah, that sounds right.”

When he gets back, he sets some items in front of her with as little fanfare as he can manage. She pokes the gifts inquisitively, squinting at him as he pretends to focus on his notes.

“What is this?”

“Tissues. You know, to blow your nose in?”

“No, dummy. I know what tissues are. What’s in the cup?”

“Tea.” He hasn’t even found his place on the page yet. That’s how little he’s actually seeing the text his eyes are fixated upon. “It’s good for you.”

She’s quiet for long enough that he lifts his gaze to meet hers. She’s holding the tea up to her mouth and breathing the steam in, and smiles sweetly at him when he makes eye contact.

“Thanks, Bellamy.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Clarke spends the weekend snapchatting him from her bed (so he’s got two friends now; it was bound to happen eventually) her reactions to her Netflix binge. Bellamy has never watched most of the shows she mentions, and when he divulges this information she sends twice as many snaps, with faces and captions that are twice as dramatic, in an effort to convince him to start.

By the time Tuesday rolls around, she’s looking a lot better and showing off her midterm grades. He’s absently trying to place the snippets of music blaring from her headphones when Octavia texts him, _SUCK IT._ He waits her out because he wasn’t born yesterday, and sure enough when he doesn’t instantaneously rise to the bait she follows that up with, _my friday class just got canceled._

He smiles down at his phone and responds, _Congrats. I get out of class at noon if you want to come down earlier than you planned._

“Octavia?” Clarke asks, nudging his leg with her foot. He nods as his phone buzzes again, and his sister has replied, _or I could just come thurs afternoon and not have to get up early._ He blinks at his phone, eyes flickering up to Clarke and back to the screen. It feels wrong for him to tell his sister he’s busy when his only plans are to hang out at the library, but it’s become a part of his week that he looks forward to.

He can’t believe he’s actually doing it, but he texts his sister, _I have a thing on thursday nights._

The next thing he knows, his phone is ringing.

“This can’t be good,” he grumbles, half-jogging to the stairwell before he answers. He can guess what Octavia is about to say, and he doesn’t want to try to have his half of the conversation in front of Clarke.

“Hey, O.”

“Do you have a _date_ Thursday night?” She demands, cutting right to the chase.

“Nice to hear your voice too. What’s that? Oh, I’m fine. Hitting that mid-semester slump, but–”

“Yeah, yeah. Answer the question.”

“It's more like– a standing appointment.” He says carefully, keeping his voice down among the echoing tile.

“I can’t believe you’re blowing me off for a date,” she laughs.

“It’s not exactly a date,” he says, momentarily overwhelmed with guilt and missing her. “I can skip it this week. You should come down Thursday.”

“No, don’t do that. I’m proud of you for putting yourself first, for once. I’ll see you Friday at noon and you’d better prepare yourself to tell me all about your Thursday girl. Or guy. Whichever.”

“Can’t wait,” he groans, halfway meaning it.

The whole thing still feels dumb until he gets back to the table and Clarke looks up from her flashcards, smiling softly at him in a way that makes his heart trip over itself. Suddenly it seems like the best choice he’s ever made.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” he assures her. “Everything is fine.”

He makes it through the weekend with minimal embarrassment on his end. Octavia cackles when she finds out who Clarke is and how he met her, but decides, in the end, that it’s a very Bellamy-esque way to fall for someone. She thinks that bodes well, as does the fact that Clarke redirected his weird property feud into an actual friendship. Bellamy hopes she’s right.

He’s walking to the library after class Tuesday when someone grabs at his elbow. He startles before realizing that it’s Clarke, that she’s looped her arm through his, and that she’s struggling to keep up with his longer stride. He slows and smiles down at her, bigger than usual, if only because he thought he had a few more minutes to prepare himself.

“Hey,” she says, returning his wide grin. “So I hung out with my friend Jasper this weekend and he loaded a ton of Swedish techno on my phone. I’ve got my earbuds; I’ve got my laptop; I’m gonna conquer this lab report.”

Bellamy wrinkles his nose, as she knew he would, and disentangles himself to hold the library door open for her.

“Swedish techno?”

“What’s wrong with Swedish techno? It’s got a good beat to amp me up. The words will be in another language, so, like, basically white noise I can tune out. It’s way better than that weird nursery music you listen to.”

She’d laughed so hard she cried when she found out his study playlist mostly consists of songs from those CDs people play for their babies, all soothing xylophone covers of pop songs. For Bellamy, who got it from Miller, it’s the perfect amount of noise to fade into the background as he gets into the zone. He’s not ashamed, usually.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” he insists, as they exit the elevator and make their way back to the table. “Too much bass stresses me out.”

“That’s just–”

Whatever it just is, Bellamy doesn’t find out because Clarke has stopped midstream to stare at their corner in confusion. Sitting at their table is a girl with dreads and at least three energy drinks, signaling to the world that she’s digging in for the long haul.

“Well,” he says, chuckling helplessly. “I didn’t see that coming.”

Clarke laughs too, turning to him with disbelief on her face.

“Do we even try to work somewhere else?”

“What’s the alternative?” He’s going to be bummed if she suggests going their separate ways and he’s deprived of one of his Clarke nights.

“How do you feel about an early dinner?” She muses. “I missed lunch and I’m kind of starving.”

“I could eat,” he says, and relief is so plain on her face he thinks he might have a shot with her after all.

They wind up at a bagel place just down the street from the library, and by the time Bellamy has collected his order and paid, Clarke has already started in on her meal.

“Um, excuse me,” he says, sliding into the booth across from her, “but I’m gonna have to ask you to move. You’re sitting at my table.”

“Too bad. I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me.”

“Even better,” he smiles, and she blushes, which is absolutely the best. It gives him the last little burst of hope he needs, and he asks, “What are you doing Friday?”

“Not going to the library,” she says right away. “But I’m open to other suggestions.”

“I was thinking we could go on a date.”

She smiles, pleased, and the knot of nervousness in his chest loosens.

“I’d like that.”

When he tells his sister about his new girlfriend, it doesn’t take long for her to call and point out that if he’d just taken her advice in the first place, this all would have happened much faster. Bellamy smiles across the table where Clarke is doodling across the front of his notebook. Tuesdays and Thursdays are still library days, and they’re still his favorite parts of the week.

“Maybe so,” he says into the phone. Clarke flashes him a smile and the warmth in his chest glows a little stronger. “But I wouldn’t change a thing.”


End file.
